Oui, Oui, Oui … Si

Risqué Commune Throes in the Towel

Wishing Upon THE Star

by Davis Paige

We hate to be all politically incorrect and all that, but looks count. Remember all those folks that could see the very fine new clothes the Emperor was wearing? … Yeah, they were lying.

You see, once upon a time in a very different America back in the ancient times of the year 2000, there was a wonderful new conceptual show called Trading Spaces. Despite its appearance as a “reality” home improvement show, in fact the popularity stemmed from the characters in the series, and not so much the difficulty (or not) of what they were doing at all.

The designers were fun, sure, the carpenters, hot, absolutely, but most important of all was the host. Moving on from an Emmy-nominated host after the first year, TLC pulled a remarkably prescient move replacing what would have seemed like a solid choice with a wonderful and heretofore little-known performer/host named Paige.

Presumably you do not tune in to the Risqué Commune for lessons on the history of cult television, however, so for our purposes today, we’ll give you a very quick timeline.

The show became wildly popular with Paige as the host. They had specials, live touring events, even a show-branded book sold at Home Depot. Each week we learned that for the low, low price of $1,000 we should probably never let our neighbors remodel our homes. Even more importantly, should you ever have decided to be on the show and watched the network assign Hildi to your week, you understood that you must pay someone immediately to inject you with malaria so you could avoid being on the program. You desperately needed to change your mind. Some people never learned this obvious truth, though, and we tuned in to watch the horror — y’know and Frank’s chickens, and honestly some fairly fun ideas.

Then the network fired Paige.

Then the show tried its best to survive with pseudo hosts, rotating designer hosts, and even no host at all.